Hello and good evening. Alan Robinson here from, Vet Dynamics. Welcome to this month's practise Management webinar.

Many thanks to NWI Animal Health and Meissource Bergen and Simply Health Professions for supporting this series of, practise management webinars, and, and really great supporters of practise management in the veterinary profession. Now, it's very odd to be presenting a webinar in that you sit in a darkened room talking to yourself. What is even stranger is to sit in a darkened room, talk about yourself, because, I'm the host of my own webinar tonight, so I need to introduce myself to those that perhaps don't know me.

Probably many do. So Alan Robinson, I run Vet Dynamics. We are a business consultancy, but the independent veterinary practises.

We help practises improve their passion, their purpose, their performance, and their people in practise and make life better for them. So, This is an exploration of some of those themes, and because it's August, because people on holidays, I'm not sure what the rollout will be for tonight. I'm going a little bit off piste and I'd be really interested in any feedback from people.

So there is a Q&A box. Don't put it into the chat box, put it into the Q&A box, on your control panel. If you have any questions, pop those in the Q&A as, as we go, and we'll pick those up and, see how we go.

So, the title is The Future of the veinfection. Now, that's a complete unknown. We do have a crystal ball at Vet dynamics, but it's not very reliable, unfortunately.

The piece I want to focus on, and I have talked about other things in other webinars, but I'm really talking about the power of community, because what I'm looking for here Is, is there something we need to be more focused on for the future with an unknown future, that we're facing in the veterinary profession? So, I want to sort of share with you a few stories, a few anecdotes, a little bit of personal experience, and a little bit of my thinking and exploration around community, how it works, and really what we at Vetnamics are trying to do, for veterinary practises and just seeing how we can make things change that way. So, Lewis, can you just give me a nod if that's working OK?

Yeah, looks fine on my end. OK, thank you. Apologies for that.

I lost a few minutes in that. So back to the question. So like I said, this could become an interesting evening for all of us as we go on.

Really, what I want to talk about is, community. Now we are very fortunate at the moment we live on a Lake in the Cotswolds, water park because we're in between moving houses from one house to another, so we have to move in temporary accommodation. On this lake, Canada geese and some Egyptian geese, and now by the name, you'd kind of guess that they travel a long distance.

Now, Migrating geese are really interesting from an aerodynamic point of view, and they fly in this the formation and the specific reason for that is that the lead bird creates an uplift from its wings, which the following two birds take advantage of, and then the two birds behind that, behind that, and hence you end up with this delta the. Action. So the birds at the back are getting maximum support from the uplift generated by the birds in front of them.

So as a result of that, as a group, geese can travel up to 70, 75% further as a group than they could on their own, which is an interesting, dynamic for them. Another interesting fact is that the lead bird is only the lead for the duration that they can actually sustain it, because obviously, they've got no support whatsoever as a leader, and they're doing all the work at the front end. So when they get tired, they wheel back to the back of the group, and a new bird flies forward and becomes the leader.

It's a bit like, if you watch cycling, it's the same sort of thing happens there. So they take turns in terms of the leadership of, of the whole process and move forward that way. Another interesting fact is if the bird gets injured or ill or can't proceed or can't carry on, it will drop out of the bee formation out of flight, but two other birds, healthy birds, will actually drop out with it.

And those two birds will stay with the ill one until it is better or dead, depends on what happens. And then they will stay with it, look after it, feed it, and then protect it. And then once it's healthy, they will get Get back in and join another group, fly for and actually try and keep things working that way.

So really interesting in terms of a, group dynamic, a leadership role, and the way they work. Now. So, what's that got to do with us?

We're not this. Well, perhaps so. Now, I've got thinking about this because one of my hobbies is actually outdoor swimming.

And I quite enjoy. Outdoor swimming, etc. We've got the lakes here.

Now, as a choice this summer, I went on an outdoor swimming holiday in Greece, which you can imagine is absolutely stunning, beautiful, really quite a, a wonderful thing to do. But we were swimming 5 to 6 kilometres a day. So it's quite a hard working, holiday.

Let me just share with you a little bit of what it was like in terms of what, what we're doing. So here's the swimmers in the water. You can see the swimming here across in the shallows.

And these are sorts of, coastal line we were swimming around. It's fairly rugged, round it like. I probably didn't swim quite as well as that.

Here's now in Sydney itself, and this is a group, and you can see it's fallen into little segments and groups. There's some faster swimmers, some slower swimmers, and there's other such things around that. Now, As you can see, swimming here, this granite coast drops off quite dramatically into the water.

It goes into this deep blue, this sort of David Attenborough deep blue planet blue. And believe me, when you're looking down that deep blue water, it is really deep. Now, a couple of things are happening here.

I turned up and, and joined a group. I didn't know who they were. They were all foreign, they were married.

Africans, they were civilians, they were French. And I'm swimming out here. Now, what I was thinking, would I have done this holiday on my own?

Would I have gone out, not in, you know, my, I mean, would I have done swimming on my own is the thing. So there's some specific things about this. Now, so, here we are swimming out there.

A couple of things happened. It was a long, hard rule. So I was worried about whether I could do it.

When I got out to this right-hand side in the deeper water, believe me, my mind started to go a little bit strange. You start to have really funny thoughts in your head when you're under stress and you these strains and sat after 2 or 3 hours in the water, and then there's deep blue water. Now, if you're Australian, and you grew up in Australia in the 80s, you probably have one common theme song.

That actually occurs in your head, OK, and this is what comes up, OK, this is the only thought that's in your head while you're out there in that deep blue water, and believe me, this is a hardening shift. Well, as you can imagine, there I sit. And of course this is a completely irrational thought, but to me, it was highly irrational at the time.

I'd seen the movie, I knew exactly how it happened. I've actually had experience with sharks in Australia. So I was in a weird sort of place doing this.

So the question is, Why did I do it? Why would any sane human being put themselves through that amount of angst, etc. On one side you've got the magnificent beauty and the wonder of Greece, and then you've got the other side, what's going on inside your own head.

As the other thing, to be honest, I was safe as a, you know, I was probably safer there than I was in Swindon, for that matter, in many cases. Now, a couple of things occurred to me that are the metaphor for this. Number one, I swam with a group.

OK. That was the first thing. Now, this is a group, like I said, I'd never met before, didn't know, I was worried about, were they better than me?

Would they think I'm a wimp if I couldn't do it? And what? Thing, and I think, here I am in the middle, a very unflattering photograph with a very unflattering pink hat on.

Pinks were the slightly slower group. OK, the greens were the really slower, at least I wasn't the green. OK.

So we were in a group was number one, and we shared things and we got to bond very, very quickly, so I can guarantee those same thoughts were going on inside their heads as well. We, the other thing that happened, which is very analogous to the goose, if we, someone ended up going slow and particularly after 1 or 2 hours in the water, people slowed down and they were sort of in the heart of 2 or 3 people would drop back and swim with them. They would look after them.

We did have the support boats as well, and they would cruise up, but of course they're trying to look after everybody. So it was quite noticeable how people, even in a group of people, but we had a Common purpose, common bond, a common reason for being there, and a common skill set is what we were sharing. So we had a, a sense of belonging and sharing.

And so we did do that drop back looking after each other. Same at the lead. When people were leading and someone got tired, someone else took over the lead and set the pace.

The other interesting thing, every one of us swam further than we would have done on our own. Further and faster. Most of us were quite worried about 2 and 3 kilometre swims.

All of us did it without too much trouble and looked forward to it. So it's quite interesting, the dynamic in a group that makes a difference. We celebrated with each other, we celebrated success, we celebrated who came in first, and we actually celebrated who came in last and made sure that everyone was included in that whole process.

So it was really quite a special thing. The other interesting thing, it made us do some weird stuff. OK.

So we did a night swim. Now, I would never swim out in that water at night on my own, but we had a lovely time out there at night. Went for a very long swim, but out around one of those boats and back, we did some stuff that, and we went to, went and investigated some stuff that we wouldn't normally go and do.

So the group gives you a power that is quite spectacular. And that's really the point I want to get across in this sense. And the reason I think that's important is because the veterinary profession right now is at a crossroads.

It's at a massive crossroads of who we are, what we're meant to be doing, where's the direction, where's it going, what's the time scales and things. We don't know how things are gonna pan out in the future. We've got sort of a lot of questions, not many answers.

And we've got some really symptomatic issues going on there, and I think this is the perfect storm, right in the present or two things. This is sort of my mantra from vet dynamics, as most of you vets probably been working far too hard for far too long because of the inefficiencies, the frustrations, the poor profitability in your businesses, and that's held a lot of taxes back, that's the people you get to deal with, . Every business we deal with or that comes to us has one of these issues at work, sitting in there as part of it.

Now, look at this list and, and sort of look at it for yourself and say, well, what's your values apply to me? Most of us have come in, one of the big ones is people and team engagement, time and resources, sort of, getting systems working and certainly looking for opportunities and this is one of the key. Challenges for everyone, so that's the, the point is, this stuff's been going on for years.

This isn't the new stuff, this is the old stuff that's now butting up against the new stuff, and this is the, the, the, the rock and the hard place on your left-hand side. And then there's the deep blue sea on your right-hand side, and we're sort of weaving this path between the two of those. OK?

We don't want to get washed onto the rocks. We don't want to get washed out the sea. We want to cut a path.

So how do we do that? And what's the vehicle we need to actually make that work? Now, I've talked about these in the past for the future, these are probably the 5 big waves of change that we need to be focused on and worried about.

The economy is certainly changing, we've got Brexit, we've got the UK, we've got Donald Trump, we've got Europe, we've got a whole load of stuff going on. We've got the demographics and that includes. Recruitment and the attrition and terms about the different, age groups in the profession, the millennials and the new IGEs coming through.

Massive corporatization, complete shift in structure that changes the competitive edge. Technology is just gonna be a massive, massive game changer. For all of us, and that's gonna either help massively or really change things like that.

And within that, there's a leadership and a cultural crisis going on as well. I mean it's an abdication of leadership, some now people stepping up the leadership. We're seeing lots of people coming with training courses, how to manage people, how to step up to management, how to manage conflict.

All this stuff is being ramped up now. A lot of people providing this sort of services. But, Is anything actually changing is kind of my question when I sit back and look at this.

And, you know, I, I can talk about this because I've been doing it for, for nearly 40 years. Well, certainly 30 in the management field of actually trying to figure out how does this stuff work? And when it doesn't, why doesn't it?

Now, then we end up with the real sort of, reality of this. And what we're up against in the profession is just so much of This, stress, anxiety, discontent, disconnection, in mental health, whatever you wanna call it, this is the symptomatic output of this, people are not happy in our profession. Now that's a general, shift in the, in the population.

It's a modern malaise, for sure, and we can blame all sorts of things from mobile phones to the millennials and everything backwards and TV and everything else. But it's a malaise we have. But we as vets seem to have perfected it to a much finer art.

And as a result, we're ending up with the symptoms of recruitment, the symptoms of overwork, etc. But really they're not addressing the cause. So And here we have an issue.

And, I mean, that's, you can say that generally. Here's some figures. I've shared these in the past.

There was a study done last year on motivation, satisfaction, retention, from Exeter University, Michelle Ryan, Chris Begney did this. Just want to show you the highlights of where this, what the problem they were faced with, the workforce shortfall. Where are all these vets and nurses?

Where have they gone? What's happened to them? And they came up with these conclusions, which are pretty damning.

And I won't dwell on them. Now, the, the, the white writing is the, is the right of the report, findings, the red is my interpretation of it. So take that as it means.

37% of respondents actively thinking about leaving the profession. So there's a, a flight away. A disconnection from our profession, and it is got to be the best profession in the world in some shape or form.

But what's happened to that? 63 2/3 feel they are working just far too hard, persistent struggle. This is the what I call the fight, flight mechanism in place.

I'm working hard, I, God, I can't cope with this anymore. Give up. OK.

Can't cope with the demands of the job, and they can't master it, they can't get better at it, they can't improve, and there's just burnout and whatever you want to call it. Half, half of it's getting some level of burnout. Now every job has stress, but when it gets to this level of disengaged burnout, you've really got to be concerned about that.

So disengagement sort of is, is, a psychological exiting, the feeling of actually why bother? What's the point? OK.

Very gently put as less ambitious is certainly one way, but lack of engagement. Now that word engagement is important because engagement is the root of employment, that's why we get out of the bed and go to work. As owners we can have a different view on that as employees we've got to have another view on that as well, so.

A few other facts, I mean, I won't dwell on it. Purposefulness and meaningfulness. Now, one of the key drivers of work satisfaction is certainly having a purpose, a meaning and purpose to go to work.

The second one is a relationship that goes with that, and a sense of vision and a sense of moving it forward, OK? 25% don't find their work stimulating or interesting. OK.

The rest of the world, everyone who looks at TV and watches Noel on TV thinks it's the most exciting job in the world. So what's going on there? Is he just cherry-picked all of it, or, you know, what have we missed out here?

So this is a challenge of expertise. We are the finest minds that the university can produce, putting in this into a purposeless, boring and unmotivating job. How did that?

OK, and it is of our own making. Or is there something innately wrong with the system? It's the interesting question, OK.

They talk about work life balance, whatever that is. I really have a, a challenge with that whole term, but half of vets and 2/3 of the age of 50, so the young, the, the, Gen X's, the younger generation, not the baby boomers struggle to maintain their balance, overworking, overstressed, working too hard, getting less back, and it's virtual. Killing them, to be honest, OK?

No choice and volition in their lives. OK, they feel helplessness and all that. And this is not just that.

This is that students burnt out by study and more, say, working too hard. There was a report that something like 40% of one of the college's 5th year were on medication just to get through exams this year. Is, is, so this, this is sort of an indictment, and you may have experience of this, you may see it, you may not, it may be you're in one of those lucky practises that bypass this pretty well, but this is sort of what happens, so.

Very brightened the BBAs decided there was things need to change. Well, you know, really, that's great. OK.

We can't look at these issues without looking at the problems of low confidence, well-being, and job satisfaction. So getting a little bit closer, they're the symptoms. There's a low confidence, there's a well-being and jobs, but even then, pretty nebulous out.

What's all that means is the question. Now, they had become some recommendations, obviously. So what they did is put it back on the employer, the work, its situation.

They didn't look at the work itself. They looked at the people who run the work and said, you've got to make these people feel valued and admired. And I'd suggest most of the employers probably don't feel valued and admired.

Feeling like one fits in with more established colleagues, whatever that means, having role models and clear routes to success, We do see routes to success. In fact, with our conference this year, we talk about routes to success, but they're not very common, is the trouble. They're really hard to come by.

And how people define success from those previous slides to think, and the simple as that, we just let people work less. Now, there's nothing innately wrong with that. Maybe we do work too many hours, but what drives us to do that?

We seem to be self volunteering for this. So that was the thing, and this is sort of my take on that whole. Process is, we, we've missed a trick somewhere.

We're not actually looking at the issue, the problem, we're sort of revisiting the same old thing, chat some more training, and it worked less, look ourselves, do some mindfulness, etc. And all that stuff is certainly helpful, but I'm still confused. I still don't know what's at the root of this.

And like I said, I'm seeing the profession I love and I've been in for an awful long time, really. Falling apart at the centre, and I, I'm, I'm confused as to why that is. Now one of the other options is pack it in and sell up and walk away, so the corporate march has been driven by a lot of this, and it's been very opportune, I mean it's been going since 1999, but it's.

Since 2012, I suppose it's really picked up in the last 4 or 5 years have been a massive, boom. So we're nearly 65% corporate, which is nothing wrong with that. It's a change in structure.

It's a perfectly valid business model. I just hope the corporates can gather their senses and resources to put together something that supports that's better than we're doing. Now, that's up to them, and I, I have no, no say in that.

What I have a say in is how do we support Independent practises, what's the model that we can look at to help that, work, but I want to do more diagnosis yet, I don't just want to chuck the same stuff up because to me it just doesn't work. OK, now, we, we ask our clients, we've got, 120 practises. When we ask them what do you actually want most at the moment, these are sort of in intrinsic motivators of control and autonomy and mastery, and we get this massive need for I want team engagement.

I want my team on board seems to be the overwhelming. Desire or or practises, the people are the problem. If only the people would come on board, get on the boat, get on the bus, whatever medical use, things would be OK.

So that's what we're, we're we're challenging with, so. But my thinking is. What's engagement all about?

How do we, how do we, we call that? Now if we want engagement, engagement is that sense of belonging, sense of working something greater than yourself, something that you're motivated to come to work, you're contributing to, you're sharing in a purpose, you're sharing in a group relationship, but like our swimming plot. We were all highly engaged for whatever reasons, flipping from fight, flight to engagement, we had the whole gamut of emotions going there.

So we were highly engaged with that process. So what's the factors in there that drive it? One thing I'll tell you that made the biggest difference in that whole process, people do not engage unless they feel safe.

When you're not feeling safe, your mind is running amok and it isolates you from the group. When the group starts supporting you, Coming in with you, backing you up, and actually giving you the encouragement, you, you don't feel safe. Once you have that and you feel safe, your mind flicks off, your mind shifts to a different level, and that's the level of engagement where you actually feel the connection back to the group, whichever group that is done.

Now that safety pulls into a couple of levels. There's the physiological, psychological, and Safety of of cyclists and when my brain was running amok with the theme song from Jaws, I was way out of physiology, OK, I was in a massive adrenaline, cortisol overdrive thinking. I want to tell you what I'm thinking, OK?

And my psychological and physiological state. Luckily, I meditate a lot, I've done a lot of long distance, by day 2 or 3, I could bring myself down from that. I could work my way through it.

It's a breathing exercise, it's a mind exercise, it's. Just keep the strokes down, bang, one arm after another, one after another. Think about your breathing, and that was, it's, it's a process and you bring yourself down and put yourself into a different state and you get into a state of flow.

When you're in flow, you can swim 2 or 3 kilometres without much difficulty at all. You gotta be fit, yeah, admittedly, but it works. The second part of safety is environmental safety, OK, safe within the environment.

So this is when it comes to the team. And the people around you work could be the leaders, the managers, and your peers, OK. Can you trust them?

And that trust goes two ways. Have you got their back and have they got your back? That's the essence of trust, OK.

Do they do what they say they're gonna do? Do they turn up and do they make it happen? OK, and they do it for you as much as they do it for them.

It's the whole equation around trust. So that's the basis of this flow and trust are the, are the are the core of safety, which is the core of engagement. I'm just building a bit of a case here as we go.

So here's my, here's my hierarchy for this. OK, we want health, performance, and well-being, which is what that study was suggesting, OK, to get people to a state whereby they can cope, they can change, they can perform, they can make decisions and they can act with volition and they can act to purpose, how do we get the OK. So we want engagement, that's the final point.

OK, so that's what we've got. Now, just putting flow and trust to me, what's that mean? It doesn't mean much, but there's some intermediate layers, and I've already mentioned them in the process.

There's 3 levels of intrinsic motivation or intrinsic energy work. One people and particularly that's a sense of mastery and. Yes, Am I getting better at what I'm getting doing and am I good at it?

OK, sense of autonomy and accountability. Have I got choice and volition, and it is my, am I accountable to someone who appreciates what that's happening, rather than being controlled by an external force, I'm being managed by my own internal autonomy and accountability. And are we moving from profit or whatever else is potentially drives the business to more of an internal sense of community.

So these are external factors, these are internal factors. The ones on the left are left brain factors, the things on the right are right brain factors. So there's a whole balancing of the neural .

Neural anatomy here to make these things happen. Now at the core of this, it's moving from that busy, stressed, anxious, fear-ridden, guilt-driven, busyness of vet practise to a sense of personal flow and interpersonal trust. OK, so this is the bit we need to get to.

If we can get that. We can then add these layers and end up with engagement. And it's, we've seen it happen.

We see how that works, OK. Now, we give you talk about this stuff in a sort of way, but what we end up is actually giving you skill sets that don't actually add to your flow. They actually detract from it.

So we actually start in the wrong way and explain how it works. Quick word about flow. What do I mean by that?

Flow is that special state between challenge and boredom. It's when you're doing something you love, doing something you're reasonably challenged by and doing something you enjoy. For me, it was that swimming form in there.

I could go for days. I just absolutely love it. For some of you, it's cycling, for some of it's horse riding, for some of you, it's football or some of it's, it's all sorts of things I get.

But there's key things with that. There's a sense of stillness and concentration and no interruptions. That was part of me getting back in the flow.

Just put one arm after the next. Keep going, keep breathing, etc. Timelessness.

I mean, you think 2 hours in the water must be the dullest sport on the planet. It's not, OK? It's for, for those that are in, in any sort of running, jogging, endurance type sports, you know that the subjective experience of time is altered.

You think, Oh God, is it over already? Those sort of things, OK? There's an effortlessness.

Now, I must say it wasn't effortless, on the process, but when you finished, it was, well, I could probably do that again. OK, it comes easily and naturally, and over time you get better and better at the sort of key factors. And there's a richness to it, OK?

You feel very much, there's 23 parts to it. You feel highly focused on what you're doing. You have a general awareness of what's going on around you.

You have a positive regard for others in your group. Put those three things together. I'll say them again.

Absolute focus on what you're doing, general awareness of what's going on around you, not intrusive, and a positive regard for others in your group gives you that richness of information and energy that actually drives this whole process. So remember those things. What do you feel when you've got.

If you want to just go into the Q&A, anyone who's experienced that at work or a player or in sport, just put something in the, just give me a comment in the Q&A box, of anyone who's had that experience, because, it does happen. We all always but once you put a name to it and you can actually look at some of that. OK, just if, if you can pop it in there.

So what's the point of flow? What's the point of? Flow.

Is a state. It's a neurological state. It's about your neurotransmitters.

It's about your, alpha waves and your beta and gamma waves all working. There's a whole neuroscience behind it, I won't go into that. But what you get is increased embodied cognition.

What that means is your mind and your body, your interception and your senses are all aligned and you're working as a single. Embodied unit. Not a not a amygdala going crazy, not a frontal cortex telling you what to do, not a thalamus sort of running all sorts of fear programmes, not a, not a hyper, hippocampus chucking in stupid memories and stupid associations with sharks you've never met.

OK. This is a settled and ongoing process. It increases.

Performance and your adaptability, which is what we're after for the veterary profession at the end of the day. It improves resilience. OK, resilience in the water for me, resilience on the bike for others, resilience at work for others, resilience to drive and keep going and without the stress.

Keeping your stress levels below the fight flight level. OK. And you have increased the information, insight, ideas, massive creativity.

And you recover that. OK, so you then have that what I call decompression stage, you come, we all stress, we all work hard, but you've got to come down for that. You go into decompression quicker, decompress quicker, and then get back to work quicker.

So all those things is what we're after, and I can vouch for those in terms of, of getting into the flow state be so. It's also a positive cycle. So those intrinsic motivators of purpose and meaning and autonomy drive flow, but once you're inflow, you get a booster on those, and they reinforce themselves.

So it actually keeps you there. And this is because of the neurochemicals of dopamine, serotonin, anandamide, endorphins, etc. That are running around and chasing in this cocktail in your head.

That's the path to mastery, so you actually improve performance much, much quicker. You accelerate performance at a stage. We see vets graduate and probably never really change their, their performance levels.

We go into practise and say, Guys, you got to do differently, work harder at work, and they don't because they just can't up the performance. They're not in flow enough to listen or respond to what we do. The basic people in flow are happier.

They are just happier with their world, the planet, the people around them, and the people they deal with, whatever their circumstances. It's really what it's really crappy. So here's the big idea.

This is kind of what I want to get at and spend the next 1015 minutes on. Life is better than ever. It's great.

We've got less disease, less poverty, less, we've got vaccinations, we've got, you know, world is, is world peace, etc. We've got Donald Trump, that's a different matter, . But we're feeling worse than ever.

We neurotic, stressed, unmotivated, and it's literally killing us. It's just. What's needed is a real massive upgrade in how we approach the performance, how we look at our primary physiological and psychological models of how we work at work, and we as vets have the knowledge to understand this and do something.

We're gonna optimise what goes on in the head. Our bodies and how we actually manage peak states. It's a bodily state that we need to choose.

And there's two parts to it, your own personal capability, and the second part is the environment you're on. What I'm going to talk about today is much more about the environment, the community in which that occurs. OK.

So my take on that is Personal engagement is what we're looking for, so people engaging with the business, and it requires a high flow and a high trust situation. OK, that's what we're looking for. In my swimming example, I was out there in the deep water.

I was in high, I worked myself into personal high flow. I put myself in a high trust environment with the people on the boat and the people in the team with me. OK, but personal engagement.

Only where we had social engagement. And social engagement was just those people dropping back and saying, lifting their heads, say, Alan, are you OK? Me swimming forward and tapping, Pedrick on the foot and say, Pedrick, you're OK?

And then all of us were just socially engaging. I'll show you that the simplicity of that. OK, we were a floating community.

And that's what that led us to do. Now, in the veterinary world, I don't, don't want to get too morbid on this, there's key issues that we need to overcome. These are either causative or they're symptomatic.

I'm not absolutely sure, I think they're all mixed up in there. One, very few of us in business or personally have a good sense of vision or purpose. Why the hell are we doing this in the first place?

I think when you graduate, you might have, I think you lose. It very quickly, OK? What's the mission we're on is the question.

We don't have any training or development or capability of mental and emotional resilience because we don't, and we have a, we have very poor ability to adapt to change. So we have a, what's called a fixed mindset around stuff and highly reactive mental and emotional, Situation going on with that, with that, and then I'll come back to some traits on that. We reject commercialism in a work situation in in favour of being good clinicians, which is fine, but it doesn't balance the commercial output of the business.

Hence poor profitability, poor performance, lack of investment, lack of, all of it comes down and money is a bit like oxygen, OK? When you're swimming, you turn your head, take some oxygen, and keep going. If you don't turn your head, you drown, and actually turning your head is making money and putting it in the system.

That's all it is, OK? Take a breath, take something in, take some oxygen, OK? And then this whole, this is the point I want to get to, is that I think our practises, our businesses, and I suspect that even the corporate models coming on, are really not resourced, capable to maintain support or scaffolding or maintain.

Of a state, a positive learning creative state, for businesses, and I need, we need to readdress that thing going back to some of these things. So here's our model that we currently have low resilience, poorly supported vets with a fixed and flexible mindset, working in a clinical but non-commercial, motivation and really working in a disengaged stressful work. No wonder it doesn't work is kind of me.

Now, that's pretty negative, and it's pretty poor, I think, but it's my experience, OK, in a lot of cases, 2 out of 4 or 3 out of 4 or 4 out of 4 in many cases, OK. But it's also more important that that one in the middle, this is who we think we are. We think this is normal.

We think this is what we signed up to. It's not. It is really not what we signed up to.

OK, we just let it happen to us, and that's another feature we're massively reacting. We react to the myths of altruism. I do it for the animals.

I love animals, it's not about the money. Well, well done, guys, you've succeeded, OK. It's a social contract that the world thinks we owe them something, OK.

We've worked hard, we do what we do. Everyone thinks it's, you know, glory and and. You know, whatever they see on the TV is and what it's all about, etc.

OK, we think busyness is an indicator of success. Business is just an indicator of busyness, nothing more, nothing less. OK.

It's just a kid, that's all. And then we're all trapped in the perfectionism of expertise. They need to be absolutely right about anything, and that's what they teach us at university.

That's what's expected of us from our clients and each other. These things have to shift. We have to get rid of this, and you can't do this on your own.

Vets in particular, we're kinesthetic, which means we're feeling people, we're high emotional sensitivity. We do what we feel is right, and when we do it, we feel it, OK? So we feel very, very, attached to our actions and our behaviours that keeps us in a highly emotional fight or flight mode.

It's just a part of the nature of who we are. We need strategies to work for. We're highly task focused and therefore, naturally hardworking.

Back to busyness, we're risk averse, we crave safety and security, OK, we'd never go out in the deep blue water because it's just scary, OK? And we're conflict averse and we crave approval from our peers and our clients and our, parents and everybody else in, in the equation, etc. So these things kind of attract, and again, I'm being highly damning here and I'm sort of putting the extremely on it, but just ask yourself, are there factors in here that we can recognise?

And you know, these are normal human factors. We've turned them into a business model, which is the trouble. OK, they're all things make one's insecure about something, for sure.

OK. But how do we just break out of this, at least in our practises, at least in independent practises, is what I'm asking. So here's the thing, we end up in practise, we end up in a consulting room, we end up in this cultural, critical, commercial paradox, living under a, a, a banner of fear and obligate, fear of, of repercussions, fear of not being liked, fear of disapproval, obligations to clients, you have to do this, you're a vet, and guilt about making money and guilt.

About charging money and guilt about whether we did a good job or not. And this is how we spend our lives. Every 10 or 15 minutes going through one of these good days and bad days are meant to be OK.

And what we're trying to do is we're trying to do all this stuff, we're gonna play this, there's the, there's the paradox. Let's see now. Let me give you a little neurophysiological lesson.

I'll do this very quickly, if you've done, you know, medicine, you, you'll know this, nurses and vets, if you, if you're not, basically there's three normal autonomic, which means from the autonomic nervous system, adaptive behaviours. In sense of danger, we do one of two things. We fight, we mobilise our system through our sympathetic nervous system, OK?

For fight or flight. Fight the devil off or ran the hell away. But this should be a very short-term, immediate response reaction.

It's not a long-term strategy. The other one, when we're instantly facing death, is really quite severe, Death threats as in road accidents or if you want to put in humans and trauma in young people, trauma, rape cases, war cases and those sorts of things, we freeze, we go into a different behaviour, it's a parasympathetic freeze behaviour where we just shut down the system, quite clearly, and they're the kind of three biggest ones. But the freeze behaviour can also occur when we're caught in a fight flight that we can't get out of.

Chronic fight fight will drop us in the freeze as well, so there's a few ways. Let me just explain that. Now, obviously this original primitive freeze mechanism is a very ancient neurological and physiological response system.

It's in reptiles, it's in fish, it's in, You know, vertebrate, chanians, etc. If in, in, in times of danger, it might just be a weather shift. They drop to the bottom of the swamp, pull their head in, curl up and hibernate can be part of it.

They can pull in hide. If a lizard senses danger, it freezes or runs under a rock and drops its metabolism, and drops its temperature so things can't sense it. Now in this middle picture, I don't want you to look at the cat cute as it is, I want you to look at the mouse.

This mouse is probably not dead. What it's done is gone into a, a, a death fate, and this is what small mammals can do, OK, so they, shut down their heart rate, they reduce their respiration, shut down the metabolic systems, they reduce the need for 02, they limit the 02 to their brain because mammals, they need to keep oxygen to the brain. They can do that.

So why they do that is because the mouse picks up and it's, it's playing with it and so boom, drops it's dead. It just doesn't hurt. So the cat loses interest, drops the mouse.

How many times have you had the cat bring the mouse inside? Oh, poor mouse. Next thing the mouse is scuttling around the living room, you're chasing it to get outside.

That's because when you do a death faint, cat like interest, mouse is back. OK. Fawns do it, gazelles do it, and other deer do it.

Young animals do it when under threat as well. It's also part of the human dive reflex, which we see in very young babies. You drop a and I wouldn't suggest you do this at home, but if you throw a baby in the swimming pool, they will shut down and go into a dive reflex, breath holding, sustaining oxygen, they can actually swim quite naturally underwater.

They lose it at a certain age as well. There was a suspicion this primitive, parasympathetic is somewhat can be associated with, hot deaths as well in children. OK.

So that's right. Now, in humans, we can't do that. We can't shut down the system and go hide under a tree.

We'd like to, but that's the almost the, the metaphor. But we end up with emotional and cognitive and bodily shutdown. Hence, a lot of chronic diseases that are part of this, especially gut disease, especially skin diseases, etc.

But dissociation shame. Hopelessness helped them to trapped numb shut down. It's called depression in the other worlds, OK?

It's what we do. It's when we see helplessness, hopelessness, and escape. OK.

It's a chronic condition, mostly in humans, OK, but in road accidents, trauma victims, rape victims, often people will just go into a shock. That's number one. Number 2 is a sympathetic fight or flight.

Now this is the one we're all used to. This is the, the one that drives from any suspicion of danger. Now that danger could be environmental, what's gonna matter, cars, I think events, thoughts, as in my thoughts running through my head out in the water, all people, I don't trust you, you look dangerous, so.

And we, we have this immediate defence mix and that kicks in. It's on 24 hours a day. It never shuts down.

It's the thing that's kept our race or our, our species alive, up till now, because without it, we would all be dead on the 7th. OK, so it works for us. However, it's meant for very short term.

And it's heavily resourced dependent, short-term duration only. We just need to kick it until we get away. What happens in the modern world with worry and frustration, irritation, anxiety, consultations, surgery, and clients, we're in this state permanently, so we're actually wearing ourselves there.

OK. In this state, we are not creative, we are not focused, we are not purposeful, we are just defending our environment and we're burning resources at a massive rate. Now here's the interesting one.

Here's the 3rd level that you probably didn't learn about at school. It's only recently been figured out. As mammals to survive, we grew bigger brains, basically, as humans, in particularly, but of course the great apes, the dogs, and they also grew from that.

Mammals tend to have immature offspring. OK, we produce babies rather than fully grown, fully functional. I think a tour turtle will hatch an egg and that turtle can swim from day one, OK, .

These things. So to do that, to pass a 33 centimetre head through a 30 centimetre pelvis, we had to restrict the, the, the age of parttuition. So we got very young.

So to ensure survival post-birth, we had to have made sure that that young animal or that baby was safe and secure. So it developed a, a, a social engagement system, and it's mostly. Nerves and vagal nerve reactions.

And there's a, if you look at, it's eye contact, it's face recognition, it's eyes and nose and mouth, it's tonality of the voice, it's, just contact. OK? And it doesn't have to be human to human, it can be human to dog.

It can be species to species as well. Mammals socially engage, and that is one of the prime determinants of safety, because you have to safety to make babies. You have to be safe to nurture babies.

You have to be safe to, suckle babies. You have to be safe to, engage in conversation and creativity. So it's a really important, piece of the thing.

What the engagement, social engagement system is, and this is that look at, it activates play, connection, nurture, closeness, social bonds, and intimacy, OK? The other thing it does, it, It inhibits, it's an inhibitory process for the other two systems, so it shuts down or dampens down, doesn't shut it off, it dampens down your fight, flight and freeze system. So it actually works for you, so it's a positive thing.

So just being escape from danger is one thing, but we need to have positive social engagement mixing with other people, essentially, or dogs. Dogs work just as well, they can make this happen. So it looks a bit like this.

Here's the key question. Every minute, every second of your life, your brain and your body is saying, am I safe, OK, it's looking for the absence of danger number one, and that's the absence from, Body and environment, so it's, it's your bodily system, your peripheral peripheral perceptions, your hearing, vision, sense, smell, but also your internal inception, so your heart rate, your breathing, your CO2, your 02, your receptors, your gut feelings. So when I'm out in the water there and I'm looking down and I sort of have a little minor panic around God, God knows what.

What's down there. My heart rate went up. OK, now that exacerbated the sense of danger.

So my heart rate and therefore, I was breathing faster as well. So until I could slow my breathing down and actually physically bring my heart and re-oxygenate myself, I couldn't get out of that state is the problem. And then what kicked in is my .

Once that kicked in, the other bits kicked in, which is my mental shape, so my memories, my thoughts, my memory of that movie, my thoughts about sharks in general, me being in the deep water, my whole emotional content, my whole background kicked in, and my beliefs and intuitions when then exacerbate that. So I. Need to sort of clear that.

That's the hard part, that's cognitive behaviour therapy, etc. OK. And that's important.

So in our communities, in our environment, we need to create an absence of danger, and we need to work with people's thinking processes. That's kind of where we've got to in the mental health realm. There's a second part of this.

So that absence of danger gets you to zero, OK? That's neutral. What we have to add to that then is social engagement systems.

Now, I'm not gonna go into this, but this is essentially The vagal nerve, which controls the heart rate, your gut, your breathing, your pancreas, so all the sort of control mechanisms of your internal organs, plus, the cranial nerves in your brain stem that are responsible for facial expression, head orientation, voice tonality, eye contact, Listening frequency, breath modulation, heart rate, and variability of those are all controlled from this section of breath. Nothing to do with your prefrontal cortex, nothing to do with the amygdala. They're connected, of course, but this is the controlled sector of that.

Now if you think about this, if the facial expression, the head orientation is all stuff we learn as infant babies to find our mother. To suckle, to be looked after, to be nurtured, to feel safe. And of course, if you don't get that as a baby, you end up with problems later on in life, is basically it.

OK. Really important. And then we relive that.

But it's the same mechanisms at work, whether you're 1 month old, 1 year old, 10 years old, or 50 years old. It's the same mechanism at work. We're using this all the time.

If someone turns up with a hoodie on, how do you feel about them when they've covered their face, covered their eyes, you can't see their head orientation, you can't, and actually they're talking in a deeper, deeper voice and you can't see your eye contact, . You can tell, you know, if, if we engage with this all the time and that's what the bit about community won't want to take it on. So, I'll quickly finish it, so just to sum that up, sympathetic fight or flight, danger, we sense that.

Environment, people, our thoughts, events that happen to us and put us into one of those stages and of course we exes that that can go into adrenaline console hyperdrive, then we're trapped in an anger rage situation which just takes longer and longer to settle down that becomes chronic. The flip side of that is the vagal freeze dissociation numbness. This is the depression side.

This is the immobilised reactivity, whereas on the left-hand side, it's the mobilised activity. If we flip between these two, we can actually see bipolar disorders at work, OK? But if there's true life threat, that can just drop us into a massive death decline of activity, OK?

And most of these are roots to autoimmune diseases as well. What we're trying to do though is positively create and manage within our groups, within our communities, social engagement, ventral vagal and cranial stimulation of connection, safety, presence, joy, curiosity, etc. We need physical, physiological, and psychological safety.

How do we do that? How do we do that? Now I'm just giving you a briefing of this webinar's not gonna be long enough, but just quickly, what I see, I've spent my life dealing with this stuff in veterinary practises, OK?

How do we deal with a difficult client? How do I deal with a vet that won't perform? How do we deal with vets to take accountability?

How do I do my praise? How do I give them feedback? How do we look at disciplinary?

I've got vets who aren't happy. I've got vets who are taking time off. I've got vets who are stressed.

And we're dealing with this, this, this top-down stuff, OK? And that's where if every business course you go on, every training event you go is gonna come on this. Why do we do this?

Cause we're trying to fix this stuff on the left. The frustration, the anger, and this is all output from a fight, flight, freeze situation. This is people in a negative physiological, psychological state, OK?

And it's possibly because they're working in a no-flow, low trust practise. OK, that's the environmental piece, and that's a low flow environment and it's a low trust of people in the process. How do we fix that?

Now there's a mechanism to this cover them today. But here's my take. Reason about 80% of vets poor performance, stress and anxiety, if not 90 or 100%, is we work in an unsafe environment.

Being a vet is dangerous to your health, basically. OK, work in many practises is massively dangerous to your health, OK, because we have a no flow trust. If we can build in these social engagement processes and there's ways and means of doing this, .

And engage this high strong vagal and cranial nerve activity to get people socially engaged, you can bypass an awful lot of this. OK, now here's an interesting little study, and, and there I'm I'm going on a little bit, but I trust people are still with us, so. This was a study done with medics in, medical school.

They took them through their training and then residency, and what they found is a lot of these medics lost social skills. They became less social, like less socially engaged with people. They were less.

To be social, but in in interpersonal situation demanding still they perform less sociably and effectively. And you think doctors, they want to become more sociable, etc. Why did that happen?

OK. What they talked about was because the training is such a doing competitive, orientated business over a long period of time, it's stressful, OK, and the graduates coming out of the vet school. This month, they're all stressed in the same way.

What it is, it, it lowered their set point for sympathetic in inactivation, OK? It became stressed quicker and easier. OK.

So the sympathetic line that we float on, the fight that is malleable, we can shift it. Now, if you can shift it down. You can shift it back up again, and that's the trick of this.

How do we learn personally, and if you're an owner of a business or a practising in a community of people to shift it up. So there's community-driven pieces to shift your baseline of sympathetic activation. We have a model around this which is quite complicated.

We can work with it. So here's my suggestion. So.

Producing a high flow high trust environment, community, and this takes, bloody hard work and a whole different shift of ideas, that creates a whole different, Set of values under which we're working, a sense of mastering what we're trying to do, understanding ourselves and self-awareness, a sense of courage to act with volition, so it's autonomy, compassion for self and compassion for others, higher self-esteem and self-worth, higher self-confidence self-esteem yourself. This is the natural outcome from high flow individuals in a high trust environment. OK, we see it rarely, not much in the vetting profession, but in other businesses we see there's examples of it.

And then all you need to do is skill set these things that are already present, is my belief, OK? You actually work from a top down or bottom-up situation. Of get the environment right and build it up from that, and then these things actually come much more naturally.

You still have to train people and you still have to give, people accountability, but it's so, so much simpler and so much easier. And there are now, and I've been racking my, my, my life to find out these models and, and I think we've. So here's sort of a quick run.

To build community, you need a couple of things, you need inspiration and inspiration brings a sense of mastery, understanding, courage, etc. So you need to energise people, you need some high energy inspiration, that's purpose and vision and mission to work on that, OK? You need connection.

So here's the key piece, you need people socially engaging with compassion, cooperation, trust and support, OK. We've gotta heal some stuff, there's some real damaged goods in the veterinary profession, some real damage being done day in and day out, and even some of these well-meaning initiatives I think are just worsening the situation really quite badly. So how do we get people self sent now you've gotta do that for yourself first before you can do it for others, but always nice.

And then we can look at change. We can look at upgrading. We can look at people learning new things, within a bigger context, higher transformation, OK?

And like I said, for me, that was my swimming journey. That's what happened in amongst all that. Si personal engagement, sense of social engagement, a lot of shared meaning, good action, good results, and just a stoking good time to be had.

A, a co-creative process. OK. So that's what we're looking for.

So, we'll just finish in a couple of minutes. Couple of tips here I'll just run into. So conditions for community, it's back to the intrinsic motivators.

One, intrinsically rewarding motivation of purposefulness and need to. We've got to be doing this for a reason. Now, if you don't know what that reason is, get some help, there's people that can help you through that, OK?

Clear goals, guidelines, and People can so they can focus on specific things, embrace choice and flexibility, they can be accountable, in some way for their own volition. So let have control is kind of the basics of this and give more control over to individuals. Now that scares the hell out of most people.

Managing, the challenge of skill, that's the mastery, measuring and monitoring progress and good feedback. It's not just about purpose. They'll say you need to focus on relationships more than results.

So the results will come out of relationships and purpose and master. The results are secondary. OK, finance is secondary, money is secondary, OK, clinical care is secondary to good relationships, OK, coaching, coaching and mentoring, immediate feedback, scaffolding, support, etc.

So a lot of the, the, the corporate models are providing. Academies of improving your clinical skills, they've managed to focus on the results again. I'm not sure how well they're dealing with people's state in that process, OK, and are they fostering growth mindsets within this as we get?

And these are all, I'm not expecting to cover all of this, OK. And then this sense of inflow, presence, reduced distraction, this is where mindfulness and some of the other activities come, come into the process and they're part of the process but they're not, etc. OK, so.

Quickly, what we're working on, what we're working on economics is looking at the operating system, we're shifting the predict and plan, planning, you know, I know we do our 3 year plans and 1 year plans and 9 year plans, but in some way they have to remain highly flexible to experiment and adapt, OK, do it, see what happens, and much more responsive processes as we go into those, OK, structure. Most what we're flat out getting vets into a hierarchical pyramid actually given up on those. What we need is networks of teams, preserving relationships over power, is really what's more important than we get much better.

This is radical, radical shift of thinking, for many of us, leadership. Again, I'm the boss, you do as you're told, centralised authority. OK.

How would you feel about collective leadership? The next goose goes to the front and leads the show. OK.

If any of you are doing CI boards and you've got your CI champions, that's a little flavour of what we're talking about, this distributed authority. Dependence on the extrinsic money, time, motivators to internal motivation. It's a journey in its own right.

Purpose and values and trust, secrecy to radical transparency. When I say radical, that's really everything in the business. Suck on that one and see how you feel.

OK, kind of a bit. What's on offer with this is we're looking for nurture, we're looking for looking after each other, we're looking for, collaboration, cooperation, what creativity we come out of that. This is our natural state.

Work and veterinary is not a natural state, OK, play is a natural state, we should be enjoying this, enjoying going to work, enjoying being vets, enjoying get the benefits we do even in the worst of situations. We want engagement. Engagement isn't a nirvana to reach, engagement is the natural state of a human being in flow in a trusted environment, so we're actually getting back to normal, not away from it, OK, so this is.

Difficult to explain, OK. And then, you know, how do we rest and recover? That is the natural parasympathetic state.

We should be spending 80, 90% of our time in rest and recovery, OK? OK, we need to turn on the switch, do the hard work, get get the stressful situation, do the hard op, do the emergency case, do the whatever, and then step back. And decompress and get it back on board, OK, and have instant hackable systems that you can put into place that every day you should be meditating, every day you should be exercising, every day you should be getting 7 to 8 hours sleep every day you should be, you know, doing, eating proper food, they're just.

The natural baselines of this stuff we don't because work too busy, OK, engagement, and then that leads to high performing teams getting stuff done. This is the high pressure stuff. This is the huge stress of high performance, not stress.

OK, this is when we perform at our best. This is when we take the rewards of, you know, life and what it holds for us and the the connections and the intimacies that we work for. So this is getting us back to life.

If we get back to life, perhaps we can get back to being vets. And for me, vets is all of that, the love and compassion that we broker every day in that consulting room, that we've put on this planet to be. So that's what we're for.

Now, that's kind of me done. So if you've got any thoughts on that, chuck them in the question box. We're gonna run out of time.

Couple of things we're doing. We're working with veterinary students at the colleges, and we put this thrive initiative together, and it's trying to get, teach them some of this stuff before they get into the veterinary world, OK, while still is things. So we're trying to get back to 2nd and 3rd years, at least at the moment.

So that's a little initiative we're working on based on these principles. They don't know it yet, but that's what we're doing. We had to sell them business stuff to get there, but this is what we're doing, OK.

We do our own vet academy, we've shifted the model so we've got resilient, safe and supported individuals, developing growth and flexible mindsets, developing clinical and commercial outlook in life and and having an engaged and inspired community work in, that's working remarkably well, we're getting fantastic results with that. So if that's of interest to anyone, that's something we do through debt dynamics for our members, building resilience and building their business and growing their, their vets into proper human beings as we go. So that's where we have a new academy starting up, in October, if anyone's interested, come to our website at parents.co.uk.

Let us know. And the other thing I'll just mention before I finish, the veteranomics conference is on in end of September. We, if anyone's really interested in this stuff I've talked about tonight, perhaps think about coming to the conference, it's for independent practises only.

Obviously, if you're a corporate, you've got your own people to look after yourselves. But I would suggest there's a, venue for finding out more about this. So on that note, I shall finish.

Thank you very much. So if anyone's got any questions, you could pop them in there. And if not, I'll leave it that.

Normally as a host, I would have some pre-prepared questions to ask the speaker to make it look like they were really interesting, but, I'm, I didn't manage to do that, to be honest. Oh, here's one, so thank you very much, Jeff, really appreciate it. Many thanks for an interesting meeting.

I retired a few years ago, I think they sca many of the problems highlighted tonight. Excellent. I'd be interested in thankfully before the corporate situation right it's OK, you sold out and you had continuity of your practise, you maintain the just that, .

How, how did, I'd be interested, Jeff, if you've got a minute how did any of this resonate with you? Did you see any symptoms of it beforehand? Because like I said, much of this is pre-existing, even in the old independent business model.

A lot of this was still pre prevalent, but I think we escaped the worst of it. I think we're, you know, more of a, a, a storm of, activity here, just if, if you got to, if you, if there's any other thing of interest there, so thank you, Jeff, thank you for the comment, really appreciate that and I hope your time it's suiting you well. Someone else?

Well, I'll leave it at that then. I thank you all very much for coming along tonight. Much appreciated.

I've know I've gone a little bit over time, but hopefully it was, well, to be honest, I've enjoyed myself, so that's the most important thing. So again, we'll see you in a month's time for next month's, webinar. Thank you very much, and we will see you soon.